High school student Cat and her classmates live in a school they can’t escape from. The school is a living entity, constantly shifting and changing, and its influence is manipulating the bodies of some of the students. Cat and her best friend Jeffrey set out to solve the mysterious and brutal death of their class president and must reach out to the different cliques that have formed as a necessity for survival.

Katzenjammer is told in short chapters that alternate between the current nightmare landscape and memories that are trickling back to Cat and helping her make sense of how she and her friends (and enemies) came to be trapped. Cat is a talented artist and the book is sparsely but effectively illustrated. Just look at that cover! It is impossible to put down until the very end and then it is absolutely gutting.

Without spoiling it, the book missed explicitly listing an important trigger in its content warning. Even without the devastating twist, the last quarter of the book descends into a downright Dostoyevskian exploration of cruelty, humiliation, collective guilt, and violence. It’s well written and creative and has good character development. Unfortunately, for all of the book’s accomplishments, it’s so bleak and troubling that I don’t know how I could recommend it to anyone, which accounts for the lower star rating.

Reviewed by Sarah Maciejewski, Patten Free Library, Bath